Description

Star Wars: Rebel Assault is an arcade flight/shooting game based on the original Star Wars trilogy. Players control Rebel recruit Rookie One (who can be set to have either a male or female voice) in combat against the Empire. Story events (which don't follow the films to the letter but instead offer their own interpretation and characters) include Rookie One's basic training, an Imperial assault on Tatooine, the battle of Hoth from The Empire Strikes Back and the Death Star battle from A New Hope. Players will control four different Star Wars craft: Skyhoppers, A-Wings, X-Wings and Snowspeeders.

The game's fifteen levels encompass navigating canyons, caves and asteroid fields, battles against TIE Fighters in space, attacks against a Star Destroyer and an Imperial Walker, a battle on foot against stormtroopers and the famous Death Star trench run. There are three different types of flight sequences: seen from either behind the own craft, from an overhead perspective or from a first-person cockpit view. All follow an 'on-rails' model, utilizing motion video backdrops displaying pre-rendered environments. The third-person levels allow some degree of free movement to dodge obstacles, while the first-person levels limit movement to a minimum, mostly requiring accurate shooting instead. Some levels offer a choice of branching paths. The on-foot level takes place on static screens, with Rookie One seen from behind, stormtroopers moving in from side corridors, and the player being able to take steps to the side to avoid enemy fire. The game features a password system - a password is given after every level in the console ports, but only after a group of levels in the PC version.

Forums

Trivia

Technology

One nice touch about the video background is that it is larger than the screen. This allowed the developers to shift it
up/down/left/right according to player movement, and it helps mask the fact that it's on rails. Another nice trick is a
very quick interpolation and rotation section of the video playback code, which allows them to rotate the backdrop +/-
15 degrees if you bank left or right.

Awards

GameStar (Germany)

Issue 12/1999 - #16 in the "100 Most Important PC Games of the Nineties" ranking

Issue 01/2007 - One of the "Ten Most Influential PC-Games" (It is almost solely responsible for the fast establishing of CD-ROM drives for PC games. This allowed other developers to free themselves from space restrictions and experiment with new ideas, e.g. FMV sequences.)